What Else
by EvenAtMyDarkest
Summary: Shawn receives a post-midnight phone call after the events of "Right Turn or Left for Dead" that finally hits it home how far he's fallen from Juliet's trust. Tag to "Shawn Rescues Darth Vader."


_If you don't remember Shawn Rescues Darth Vader very well this fic probably won't mean as much because it's written in a way that assumes readers do remember, but it shouldn't be too much of a hindrance as long as you recall the lie detector scene._

 _P.S. I don't own Psych or its characters or concepts, just the following combination of letters._

* * *

The second night Shawn crashes at Gus's apartment, he starts his attempts to sleep sometime around 11pm. It's rare for said attempts to begin so early, but based on last night, he knows he'll need plenty of time if he wants to have any chance of success.

He read somewhere once that it takes the average person fifteen minutes to fall asleep. He has a lot of problems with that statement—first of all, what is meant by the "average" person? Like a C student? A middle-aged man or woman? Someone who lives on the equator? He doesn't fall into any of those categories (actually he might have gotten enough C's to land him in that first one, but his school years are kind of a blur to him so he can't be certain), so he supposes it could make sense that it usually takes him at least half an hour to calm his brain down enough to make sleep possible.

 _That makes no sense, Shawn_ , comes Gus's voice from somewhere in his head.

He props himself up a bit to locate the clock across the room. He normally checks the time only once or twice between the beginning of his attempts to power down and his eventual success. Tonight, though… tonight is different.

It's not that Gus's couch is uncomfortable. No, he can handle a couple of protruding springs. And the pillows are actually quite heavenly after he's fluffed them for a few minutes. It's not even the absence of Juliet's warm body next to him. If she were away on a business trip or something, or he were just spending the night at Gus's after a late one playing video games, he might be a little less comfortable, but ultimately it wouldn't really keep him awake.

It's the knowing why she's gone that's the problem.

It's knowing that it's entirely his fault.

He does his best to clear his mind. It's not something he's ever been good at. He tries picturing a brick wall in empty space—the wall is promptly bulldozed. He tries putting everything that's running through his mind on a piece of paper and taking a giant mental eraser to it—no good, the spots he's already cleared keep filling up again with graphite images before the job's finished. Plus he's always found those pesky eraser shavings super distracting. How is he supposed to get anything done with them floating around his subconscious?

He sucks at this.

When his phone rings, at least he's chilled out enough to jump in startlement, but then again, he has just been startled out of his chilled state. They just kind of cancel each other out. He reaches behind his head, grasping around for it, wondering if time is passing even more slowly than he thought if it's still an hour at which he could be receiving phone calls. Of course, it might be Vick with an urgent case. And just after he figured out the Mystery of the Murderous Swede—c'mon, Chief, a guy's gotta rest once in a while, whether or not he's a psychic.

It would probably be better than lying here failing to sleep, though.

He still hasn't found the phone after two rings, so he twists his body around to add his powers of sight to the mix. That makes things significantly easier. When his eyes fall on his phone, he makes immediate note of two things, in ascending order of surprisingness: one, it is, in fact, 12:49 in the morning; and two, the name displayed across his screen is "Jules."

He wastes no time before snatching up the phone, fumbling and almost dropping it, and hitting _Accept_. There is, of course, a number of reasons she might be calling now of all times, most of which would probably be both difficult to guess and not at all what he wants out of this conversation, but he can't stop himself from hoping. Hoping and worrying. Because if she's not calling to reconcile, then it's something very serious. He knows she doesn't want to be talking to him right now. He shudders to think what might have driven her to initiate a phone call at almost one in the morning.

He jams the phone against his ear as he sits up, throwing the blanket off his legs with his free hand, and says, trying to sound calm, "Jules."

"Shawn."

She sounds fine. She's not hurt. He releases a breath he didn't realize he was holding. "Is something wrong? You okay?"

"Shawn, I need to ask you something."

He flinches. It's barely more than a twitch, but it's definitely there. Seconds later, he realizes what just happened, and wonders if it's possible he's already developed a Pavlovian response to those words.

He's not going to make the same mistake he did last time. "Anything."

There's a pause on the other end of the line. He considers the remaining possibilities. There are a lot, really. She's probably been spending all of her free time thinking about this, and there's years and years of history between them, and this lie spanned the entirety of it.

He imagines her staying up, deciding probably just a few minutes ago that she had a question she did want him to answer, as immediately as possible. He can picture her hesitating before picking up her phone, noting the ungodly hour, but ultimately pressing _Call_ , knowing that normally he'd still be up anyway. He can easily see her worrying when the ringing had been going on for a little while, thinking what if she was waking him up, but on hearing his voice, she pushed all that down, telling herself to remain professional, that there was no going back now.

He misses her so much.

She says, "Do you remember the murder at the ambassador's mansion?"

Oh. That one. He turns over his response options in his head; he could go simple and just say "Yes," or he could be as truthful with her as she deserves. "Listen, that intruder—"

"Don't, Shawn," she says forcefully, and he can just see the slight sheen over her eyes, her set jaw. "Do me this favor: do not give me any extra details about past cases. All right? I don't want to know."

He's silent for a moment, cursing the fact that his attempt to placate her just a little, to make things a little fairer, has blown up in his face. He supposes, after six years of getting away with lying to the police, he had this coming. "Okay," he says softly after a few seconds.

There's another short pause, and she continues, voice clipped, "Lassiter hooked you up to a polygraph. I don't need to hear your side of the story behind the main reason he did that. I don't care. But Shawn… he asked if you were psychic."

When she doesn't continue, Shawn says, "He did."

"You said you were."

"I did."

"And the polygraph backed you up."

"Right."

"But you're not."

He grimaces, but he doesn't hesitate. "I'm not."

"Do you remember what else you said?"

He blinks into the dark room, phone still held up to his ear. That entire day his hands were very full; he said a lot of things. Not just along the vein of solving the case, but trying to keep himself from becoming a suspect, not to mention that whole business with Lassie finding out about—

Shawn's free hand goes up to his forehead, which still hurts from last night, and he thinks he might actually feel nauseous. "Oh my God."

He doesn't know if she says anything in response to that; his mind is racing, the room around him is spinning like he's in a washing machine. But he can't keep track of any of it. He's numb.

It's even worse than he could have imagined.

He screwed up. He screwed up big time.

"Juliet O'Hara," he whispers, and though the room is still dead silent apart from him, the blood rushing in his ears almost leaves him incapable of hearing his own voice, "I have told… so many lies in my life, and there's been a huge spike in concentration since I started working for the SBPD. Since I met you. But there's—there's no correlation there. I mean, correlation I think is the right word—no causation? Something like that…"

Wrong. All wrong. He's saying all the wrong things, just like when she first figured it out, just like… like when… He places his hand on his chest, trying to calm down his breathing. Is this actually happening? Is he having some kind of fit?

He thinks he hears her say his name. But he's been hearing that ever since the wedding reception. It was always wishful thinking; he'd turn around slowly and scan the room for her _just in case_ , but he never actually managed to convince himself that she was there with him.

"Jules," he tries, voice hoarse, and raises his voice nearly to normal talking volume in an attempt to somewhat clear his throat without pausing, "I have never lied about the way I feel about you."

Silence.

"Jules, do you hear me? I lied about being psychic. And I am so sorry you found out the way you did. I should have been the one to tell you. But if you think for one second that I lied about loving you—" _Careful. Don't blame her. None of this is on her. Make that clear._ "Then I'm clearly even crappier at showing how much I love you than I thought I was." He draws in a breath through his nose, and it's wetter than he would have expected. "I'm not capable of imagining loving you any more than I do. I never have been, and yet somehow, every morning when I see you, I fall even deeper in love with you than before."

He closes his eyes, pausing for just a moment. He's collecting his thoughts; he doesn't expect her to interject, and she doesn't.

"Jules, you are amazing and beautiful and I could catalogue your virtues in alphabetical order and I don't deserve you. I'm not going to try to prove that I do. But…" _Focus, Spencer_ , he tells himself sharply, wiping roughly at his eye, which might actually still be dry; he can't be sure either way. "You can be sure of one thing: if there was something I could do to get you back, I would break my back trying, because the only thing that lie detector was wrong about was me being psychic. I'm just a non-psychic idiot who's in love and never realized how much I was taking it for granted until… until…"

She's still silent.

Suddenly it sounds different though.

"Juliet?" He takes the phone quickly down from his ear, and the phone lights up with its menu screen. The call has been dropped.

Did she _just_ hang up? Or did he just suddenly notice that the white noise in the background of the call was gone because he shut up for a moment? He can't be sure.

Shawn stares at the phone until the screen goes black and it slides out of his hand and clatters on the floor. Part of him knows he does it because he's seen so many movie characters do it that it's been engrained into his behavior, but another part is genuinely too tired to care that it's fallen, and forget retrieving it from the floor.

He doesn't sleep at all that night.


End file.
